Interaction Design: An Introduction

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Each of the approaches has produced great products over the years, and perhaps none more so (because it is used the most often) than what I call "genius design." Genius design is when the designer relies on his or her own experience and skill to design, without any input from users. It's done by designers who either don't have the resources or the inclination or temperament to do research. Too often, it is practiced by inexperienced designers with little skill, but it can and has been used by many designers to create impressive things. Reportedly, the iPod was made with no user research, for example.

Danzico: When have you used the genius-design approach successfully?

Saffer: More often than I care to admit. In the past especially, I've worked on projects where there was no time or money or willpower to do any of the other approaches. I just finished designing Soundflavor, a music application and accompanying playlist-sharing website with the genius design approach, and I'm pleased with the results thus far.

Of course, even if you do have the resources and inclination for one of the other approaches, I find there are always moments on every project when I employ genius design. I have hunches and make educated guesses based on previous experience. One could argue (and many have) that this is why people hire designers: for this sort of genius.

Danzico: Why is it important to design hackable products?

Saffer: That's a good question: I'm not sure it is important. People will hack your products anyway! That being said, leaving "seams" in your product for people to customize it to suit their needs is a very interesting practice.

Danzico: Seams?

Saffer: As designers, we're traditionally taught to get out of the way of the product, to leave no trace of ourselves or how the product was made. Think of the iPod in its hermetically sealed case, for instance. But Matthew Chalmers had this idea of "seamful systems (with beautiful seams)" where, for those so inclined, you could see and take advantage of how the system was created and adapt (hack) it for your own use. Seams afford hacking, in other words.

Companies can get new ideas for new products through exposing the seams and affording hacking, and could even repurpose their existing product to take advantage of the modifications people are doing to it. Of course, it's also a dangerous practice. People can hack things in dangerous ways that could open up the companies to serious liability issues. If they are going to build in seams for hackers to rip open, designers need to make sure just what it is exactly they are exposing. On a financial website, of example, it's one thing to expose the CSS so that someone could change the colors of their version of your site. It would be quite another thing to expose users' financial data!

Danzico: For some time, people have been able to hack their TiVos to view their flickr streams on their televisions. Next, you might imagine a similar hack for YouTube videos, streaming on our TV as well. With users having this much control over the design of their environment, where does the interaction designer's role start and end? Are interaction designers in danger of losing control?

Saffer: The idea that we as designers control any product is a myth. It's a useful myth, to be sure, since it allows us to actually make the product. But once it is out of our hands and out into the world, we can no longer control what people do with it. Sure, we can design how we hope people will use it, but there's no guarantee they will use it that way.

The interaction designer's role is one of facilitating particular uses for a thing, and possibly dissuading other uses. I will design X so it can be used for Y. If someone uses it for Z, well, that is his business. The problem comes when Z is something harmful. If I design a hammer, and someone uses the hammer to bludgeon someone, how responsible am I? Think of email: we want to design email clients so that they are easy to send and receive emails.